Dennis Schwarz

Author Archives: Dennis Schwarz

SnatchLoader Reloaded

Executive Summary SnatchLoader is a “downloader” malware—a type of malware that specializes in distributing (or loading) other malware onto infected computers. We first started seeing it in the wild around January 2017, but after a few months it went dormant. Recently, development of the malware […]

LockPoS Joins the Flock

While revisiting a Flokibot campaign that was targeting point of sale (PoS) systems in Brazil earlier this year, we discovered something interesting. One of the command and control (C2) servers that had been dormant for quite some time had suddenly woken up and started distributing […]

Another Banker Enters the Matrix

This post takes a look at a new banking malware that has, so far, been targeting financial institutions in Latin America—specifically, Mexico and Peru. Initially, we’ve called it “Matrix Banker” based on its command and control (C2) login panel, but it seems that “Matrix Admin” […]

Greenbug’s DNS-isms

Over the past few months there has been a lot of research and press coverage on the Shamoon campaigns. These have been the attacks on Saudi Arabian companies where a destructive malware known as Disttrack was deployed. The malware, using stolen credentials, spreads throughout the […]

Acronym: M is for Malware

A malware researcher known as Antelox recently tweeted about an unknown malware sample that caught our eye. Upon further investigation, it is a modular malware known as Acronym and could possibly be associated with the Win32/Potao malware family and the Operation Potao Express campaign. This […]

Dismantling a Nuclear Bot

A recent tweet mentioned that a new banking malware called “Nuclear Bot” has started to appear for sale on underground marketplaces. Its price starts around $2500 which is more than double the price of another recent entry to the market. This post dismantles a sample […]

Dismantling a Nuclear Bot

A recent tweet mentioned that a new banking malware called “Nuclear Bot” has started to appear for sale on underground marketplaces. Its price starts around $2500 which is more than double the price of another recent entry to the market. This post dismantles a sample of this malware to determine whether we need to take […]

FlokiBot: A Flock of Bots?

In early October, Flashpoint released an analysis of an underground forum advertisement for a new malware family known as FlokiBot. It took some time before a sample was found in the wild, but a researcher known as hasherezade flagged one on VirusTotal in early November. […]

FlokiBot: A Flock of Bots?

In early October, Flashpoint released an analysis of an underground forum advertisement for a new malware family known as FlokiBot. It took some time before a sample was found in the wild, but a researcher known as hasherezade flagged one on VirusTotal in early November. She also wrote an analysis of its dropper here. This […]

Flokibot Invades PoS: Trouble in Brazil

Introduction Threat actors salivate at the thought of an increased volume of credit and debit card transactions flowing through endpoints they have compromised with card-stealing malware. While there are many distinct malware families that scrape unencrypted process memory to obtain cards, some of these malware […]

Panda Banker’s Future DGA

Since we last visited the Panda Bankers at the malware zoo, two new versions have emerged: 2.2.6 and 2.2.7. While sifting through the encrypted strings of the latest version, two interesting ones stood out: dgaconfigs DGA, download “%S”. Tracing the first one through the code does indeed lead to a DGA or a domain generation […]

Who Let the Pandas Out? Zeus, Zeus, Zeus, Zeus

A few months ago Proofpoint released a blog post about a new banking trojan called Panda Banker. They credit Fox-IT with the discovery and both companies indicate that it is another variant based on the Zeus banking trojan source code. Under the hood Panda Banker certainly feels Zeus-like, but it has plenty to distinguish itself […]

Communications of the Bolek Trojan

A few weeks ago CERT Polska released a short blog post introducing a new malware family now known as Bolek. PhishMe and Dr.Web have since added some additional insight into the family. Browsing through a memory dump of the malware, a Webinjects section sticks out. Webinjects usually imply banking malware, so it seems Bolek picks […]

Alpha Testing the AlphaLeon HTTP Bot

ASERT was initially alerted about an emerging threat called AlphaLeon by Deep & Dark Web intelligence provider Flashpoint in August 2015. It caught and kept our interest because it sounded like it could be a new “banker” malware family. While it took some time to find samples of the malware in the wild, this post […]

Alpha Testing the AlphaLeon HTTP Bot

ASERT was initially alerted about an emerging threat called AlphaLeon by Deep & Dark Web intelligence provider Flashpoint in August 2015. It caught and kept our interest because it sounded like it could be a new “banker” malware family. While it took some time to find samples of the malware in the wild, this post […]

Estimating the Revenue of a Russian DDoS Booter

At the end of 2014, ASERT presented research where we mapped some DDoS booter advertisements on Russian language forums to their behind-the-scenes DDoS botnet infrastructures. For this post, we will follow up on that research a bit by looking at another one of these mappings and trying to estimate the revenue generated by the DDoS […]

Estimating the Revenue of a Russian DDoS Booter

At the end of 2014, ASERT presented research where we mapped some DDoS booter advertisements on Russian language forums to their behind-the-scenes DDoS botnet infrastructures. For this post, we will follow up on that research a bit by looking at another one of these mappings and trying to estimate the revenue generated by the DDoS […]